Wardogs players, your wishes have been answered: you’re getting your precious loadouts, even if the developers really don’t like what you’re probably going to do with them.
In a detailed reply to a Reddit user imploring developer Bulkhead to add custom loadouts to Wardogs, the company’s CEO, Joe Brammer, confirms that the feature is coming and explains why it’s taking so long. The TLDR is that the developers specifically opted out of loadouts to force players to experiment with their kits, which impedes public testing. For that reason, Bulkhead is holding off on adding loadouts until they feel everything’s been put through its paces.
“Internally, we deliberately never gave the team loadouts,” says Brammer. “If we had, everyone would have gravitated to their favourite setup and only ever tested with that. Withholding them forced the team to play with everything, which meant far more of the game got properly tested. The same thinking applies to players right now.”
An issue with Wardogs’ rebuy feature, which lets you quickly buy the same gear you used before you died, also informed Bulkhead’s thinking on loadouts. As Brammer explains, during pre-alpha testing, the rebuy button appeared as a pop-up, and players were quick to use the feature even if they were repeatedly getting their asses kicked. “We’d expected them to go hunting for better weapons, and they didn’t,” says Brammer. “They kept getting beaten, and a lot of them put the game down quickly.
“So we removed rebuy for a few tests, and lo and behold, feedback from new players got much more positive. We could see their unlock paths working as intended and sentiment improved.” The rebuy feature hasn’t been removed, but it’s now been moved to “a less prominent button in the bottom left.”
As Brammer explains, all of this led Bulkhead to the decision to delay Wardogs loadouts so that everyone had time to experiment with their kits before deciding on a familiar loadout. Brammer says that when loadouts are introduced – and the timing on that hasn’t been confirmed – “they’ll be something you unlock with in game cash through the meta game, a way to spend what you’ve earned on a smoother experience.
“Buy as many as you like, or none at all,” he says. “Right now it’s really important to us that players keep trying different weapons rather than settling on one setup, just as we needed our own team to, because otherwise it would heavily skew the balance data we rely on.”
As commenters are quick to point out, not having a loadout option doesn’t stop players from simply setting up the builds they like manually and continuing not to experiment with different weapons, and that adding loadouts would only streamline that process, but Bulkhead is definitely making decisions based on data that isn’t publicly available. Regardless, for now Wardogs players can at least look forward to the option to remove another obstacle in between rounds of pew-pewing.